Death and life, leaving and staying: puppets on a stage. When the single thread snaps, they fall free.
Translator’s note: Freud and Rousseau appear here as characters in imagined scenes.
Totoro’s Panda Father and Divine Mother
Beneath the camphor tree: “Listen, Totoro’s snoring!”
“Huh? Where is it? That belly going up and down right in front of you—that’s Totoro!”
“Oh, and Dad, if you keep fussing and fretting like a grown-up, you won’t be able to see it.”
Since we needn’t waste our time guessing what My Neighbor Totoro is trying to say, we’ll have to begin our analysis with Miyazaki himself. Freud strokes his beard and says: dreams don’t come out of thin air; they have deep roots in everyday life. Giving birth to a Totoro this big must have taken quite some effort (laughs).
Miyazaki’s works fall roughly into three groups: stories he took on as adaptations, such as Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises; stories begun on the spur of the moment and discussed again and again with friends, such as Kiki’s Delivery Service and Porco Rosso; and stories that had long been brewing in his mind, such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, and My Neighbor Totoro.
“What’s that, Mei? You want to know who Totoro’s father is? That’s a tricky one! A squirrel’s tail is a bit longer than Totoro’s, a cat doesn’t have such a big belly, and since when do mice eat acorns?”
“Ha! Here’s the answer: a panda!”
Just after planning for Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro was completed, the Chinese government donated two giant pandas, Kang Kang and Lan Lan, to Ueno Zoo, setting off a panda craze across Japan.1 Toei rode the wave with The Panda’s Great Adventure, while Tokyo Movie decided to make Panda! Go Panda! It was this film, conceived by Miyazaki in 1972, that became the prototype for My Neighbor Totoro.
Three Girls
Mimiko is a little girl with red pigtails. When her grandmother goes away to tend her grandfather’s grave, she stays behind, living on her own. Before leaving, Grandma tells her to write to her every day, and the girl dutifully does so. Anyone with eyes will already have recognized the opening of My Neighbor Totoro. Their mother is away because she is ill, their father is busy with work, and Mei and Satsuki have to look after themselves. In My Neighbor Totoro, too, letters connect family members far apart.
“父さんから：
サツキ、めい、母さんが病気になったこの数日、お疲れ様です。本当に大変でしょう。でも、もうちょうど我慢してください、幸せは私たち四人を待っているぞ。2
Satsuki, Mei, you’ve both had a hard time while your mother’s been ill. I know you don’t want to leave your friends, but you’ve both been thoughtful enough to keep it to yourselves. But more than that, you want your mother back beside you, healthy and well, don’t you? When I told you we were moving to the countryside, Mei, you were so frightened at first that you burst into tears. But thanks to your sister’s comforting words and Totoro’s goofy smile in the picture book, you dried your eyes and began to imagine the forests and fields as a paradise where fairy tales live. That’s right, Mei, there’s no need to worry. The countryside I come from once protected me, and it will surely protect you forever. Even if the night wind lifts you into the sky, it’s only playing with you.”
In an interview, Miyazaki said with a smile that Mei and Satsuki were really two embodiments of the same girl. Naturally, that girl is Mimiko.3 If Mei inherited Mimiko’s lively looks, then Satsuki inherited her headlong nature and her hardworking competence. If we close our eyes, we can almost hear Satsuki’s laughter as she races across the tatami, sending the house’s dust sprites fleeing. When we rub the sleep from our eyes in the morning, the first sound we hear is the hymn she plays on pots and pans in the kitchen. Miyazaki is an animation fundamentalist—in the best sense—and demands the utmost expressive power from movement. The girls he draws seem never to doubt the future; they are always running resolutely into the distance. They are not rushing because work compels them. There are simply too many small miracles in life for anyone to take them all in. To keep up, we too must grow younger, and younger still.
Wow! It’s Huge!
Dad lifts his groggy head from a pile of books, and his eyes suddenly light up. “Thank you for the flowers, Mei!”
After passing through the bamboo grove, Mimiko discovers that her home is a mess. The culprit is a soundly sleeping panda cub. She makes friends with it and invites it to come and play at her house. The smell of milk draws the panda father over. Ha! And so our hero makes his entrance with a bashful Cheshire Cat grin. In those paws that cannot reach his back no matter how hard he tries, and those short legs that naturally draw together when he jumps, the beginnings of Totoro are already unmistakable.
“It’s true! Totoro was this—big!” Mei gestures so fiercely that she looks like a cocoon fighting itself.
Human smallness in the face of nature seems to be one underlying reason for Totoro’s—and the panda’s—enormous size. But as Miyazaki fills that body with tremendous power, he also rounds it off and makes it furry, so that we can hug it and fall peacefully asleep. Ferocity and tenderness mingle in Totoro: this is the most profound metaphor for nature. When Nausicaä lies inside an Ohmu’s enormous eye, waiting for the spore-snow to drift quietly down, when the Forest Spirit gazes curiously at the bullet about to pierce its neck—human beings have already become children under nature’s gaze. Children’s mischief can be forgiven without limit. Parents always shoulder the responsibility without a word, until spoiling their children wears their own bodies out. Perhaps we have gone unpunished so far only because nature cannot bear to punish its children.
Totoro opens its sleepy eyes halfway. Seeing that it is Mei making mischief on the tip of its nose, it quietly swallows the sneeze that was just about to escape.
Panda Father and Totoro Mother
The warmest moment in Panda! Go Panda! comes when Mimiko asks Mr. Panda to be her father and give her the embrace she has never had the chance to receive. Half joking, he promises: “I can’t be your mother, but I can certainly be your father.” Perhaps this is the line written in the blank spaces of My Neighbor Totoro’s screenplay. The children’s relationship with Totoro has gone beyond friendship: they are coming to rely on Totoro for support. We can therefore surmise that Totoro’s arrival likewise makes up for the maternal love Mei and Satsuki are missing. As a hidden mother, Totoro cannot speak and has never once been called “Mom,” yet stays faithfully beside the children, helps their wishes come true, and then—waits for Satsuki to fall weeping into its arms.
Rousseau watches Émile stumble in the woods, dust himself off, and get up on his own. Smiling, he reflects: “Nature is always children’s first mother.”
The similarities between Panda! Go Panda! and My Neighbor Totoro extend beyond their characters to their plots. Three important episodes in My Neighbor Totoro—Mei going to school, bringing an umbrella in the rain, and Mei getting lost—all appear in Panda! Go Panda!, only with the panda cub in the younger sister’s place. It is a little disappointing to discover that Totoro was not a miracle Miyazaki drew in a sudden flash of revelation, as though the smell of artificial leather had seeped into our childhood dreams. But we should pay more attention to the fact that it was Totoro who stayed in the hearts of our generation of children, not the panda father. That difference is crucial: it proves that Totoro did not get all its genes from the panda.
Mei looks up. “If Totoro’s father is a panda, then who’s its mother?”
“A kami!”4
“What?!” Satsuki cries out excitedly, then quickly covers her mouth.
To reassure Mei, her father acknowledges Totoro as master of the forest. But this master’s “true identity” remains an open question. When Ghibli brought out My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies, the distributor gave them a chilly reception: one film mentioned “ghosts,” while the other had to do with “graves,” making their subject matter too dark. The film, of course, offers no direct answer. In fact, whether Totoro is a ghost, a yōkai, or a kami, any of these identities fits its invisibility to adults.
Satsuki calls their new home a “haunted house” in a letter to her mother, so viewers can hardly be blamed for taking Totoro to be a ghost. Given Japan’s cultural context and Totoro’s unusual powers, it seems closer to a yōkai. And if we notice the shrines on either side of the road before Totoro appears, there is nothing to stop us from revering it as a kami. Even Miyazaki is evasive on this question, calling Totoro only a “strange creature.” According to Toshio Suzuki, the original advertising copy read, “This strange creature probably no longer exists in Japan.” It was only because Miyazaki insisted it did that the wording was changed to “still exists.”
By now, another possibility has emerged: Totoro is merely Mei and Satsuki’s companion in dreams and does not exist in reality at all. Someone has pointed out that in the novelization of My Neighbor Totoro, “Totoro exists only in the sisters’ dreams, whereas the film rejects this.” Yet the narrative’s many details suggest that even in the film, Miyazaki deliberately avoids declaring whether Totoro exists, leaving it free to drift above an imagined world where different possibilities coexist.
A Companion in Dreams
It is not hard to see that every appearance of Totoro is accompanied by signs of a break in reality. Its first appearance, for example, ends with Mei waking from a dream. Satsuki asks whether Totoro looks just like the one in the picture book, suggesting that Mei could have constructed Totoro’s image entirely from things in the real world. Its resounding roar comes from the mountain wind that raged the night before. That wind swept the firewood out of Satsuki’s hands and into the air, hurled a bucket down hard enough to break a hole in it, shook the house with a deafening roar, and finally knocked open the door to imagination. Then, through Mei’s telling, it wormed its way into her sister’s subconscious, making her see Totoro at the bus stop amid the hypnotic, unending patter of rain (notice that Mei is already asleep). Totoro’s third appearance likewise ends in contradiction: their father, working late into the night, somehow shows no reaction to the children’s cheers outside; the next morning, the immense tree that covered half the night sky has vanished without a trace.
The fourth appearance is the most contentious. Without Totoro’s help, finding Mei seems impossible. Yet two details are still worth pondering: (1) it is only because Satsuki trips badly that she falls into Totoro’s tree hollow; (2) Totoro does not personally help look for Mei. Could we, then, understand the Catbus as a vision Satsuki sees while unconscious? Perhaps Mei knows that she cannot walk all the way to her mother’s hospital, and, like her sister, comes to the tree hollow to ask Totoro for help.
Who knows the truth?
Miyazaki has never escaped the uncertainty over whether Totoro exists. At the end of Kiki’s Delivery Service, Kiki recovers her lost magic. The black cat who could once speak jumps onto her shoulder, but gives only an ordinary meow. It is certainly no coincidence that Kiki and Jiji’s names sound the same in Chinese.5 The black cat is the girl’s mirror image—the reality that has never shown its face. Perhaps the cat has given up the power of speech to be with his lover, while Kiki has finally become part of the town’s life and awakened from childhood’s dream-world. Yet Spirited Away, another story of a girl growing up, offers precisely the opposite suggestion. At the end, the hair tie Haku gave Chihiro catches the sunlight.6 It is the mark of someone who has been spirited away. It means that none of what she experienced was a dream, and that magic truly exists.
—Which Miyazaki, then, should we believe? One murmurs: reality is reality, after all. Only children are allowed into Narnia; once you grow up, you can never return to that magical kingdom. The other whispers: don’t forget us. In that world far beneath the earth, unexpected miracles are always unfolding. We will always be watching you, protecting you, from somewhere you cannot see.
Some say that after Kiki’s Delivery Service, none of the heroines in Miyazaki’s animated films could fly anymore. Yes—because they had grown up.
Goodbye, Totoro.
Editor’s note:
Panda! Go Panda! is an animated short about “family,” written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Isao Takahata. It was released in Japan in 1972.
Of course, this article’s speculation about Totoro is just an exploration, not a definite assertion, mind you. As for the rumor that Totoro is a god of death, take a look at Jiatong’s recent Totoro video, which clears that up.